The summer after I realized I was trans, I spent a lot of time online. I wanted to learn about other trans people and be seen in my experiences. The internet helped me do so discreetly, during a time when I experienced a lot of scrutiny at home for my gender expression. I read about
The day after the 2016 election, I woke up, logged onto social media, and saw outcries of anger and fear from my friends. On that day, I wrote a commitment to myself, and an invitation to others: “We are the people that power our movements. We are the people working towards change that lasts beyond
On Saturday Sept. 19th 2020, APIENC’s Ecological Justice League (fka TTAC) brought folks together for a fun and creative Writing and Haiku Party! Participants engaged and connected with each other in order to better articulate their connection with and the impacts of the climate crisis through storytelling, haiku, and poetry. Here are some the creations that came out of the event!
LEX & the APIENC family brought so much… so many things, but what i’m most thankful for is the healing that it brought to me when i felt too overwhelmed to know where to start, & i want to share some of my learnings, un-learnings & re-learnings. radical vulnerability, as nerve-wracking as the build-up is,
When we took on the role of coordinating APIENC’s Summer Mutual Aid Project, we were both fairly new to APIENC, just joining as a volunteer and Summer Organizer. Despite our newness, we understood the importance of mutual aid in this moment and were committed to building interdependent QTAPI communities. We didn’t fully know what it would take and look like for APIENC’s intergenerational trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander community in the Bay Area, so we were curious and committed to learning as we went.
It all started with the Dragon Fruit Project (DFP) reunion, scheduled to happen on March 21, 2020. Since last December, a volunteer team had been planning for an in-person event to celebrate all those who had contributed to our intergenerational Dragon Fruit oral history project. However, as the date came closer and as COVID-19 spread in the Bay Area, the team decided to indefinitely postpone the event, and to prioritize the safety and health of participants who were planning to attend. Even though we were physically unable to see each other, we decided to offer a Phone Tree as a resource for community members to check in with one another. As the COVID-19 crisis escalated, California officially put into place Shelter-In-Place orders that would drastically change our community’s needs and ways of organizing.
I haven’t always felt comfortable asking for help. Previously, I thought asking for help meant I was not “good enough,” and I thought that struggling on my own was a reflection of true strength. I learned this mindset from my family, who are Brown working class immigrants always battling to survive. I experienced this individualistic culture in my own Indo-Caribbean communities, where asking for support was never seen as an option. I witnessed systems of power silencing the needs of marginalized communities. Different internalized oppressions fueled this mindset, and I never had a space to unlearn these ideas and invite in new values.
